Facebook Reverses New TOS

One of the most heated debates in the last few days has nothing to do with this week’s 2009 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. Rather, it has to do with Facebook and the fact they changed their Terms of Service over two weeks ago into a heated privacy debate. The View, ABC’s daytime talk show, even decided to get “geeky” to discuss this rather obtrustion to your “not-so-private” content.

Two weeks ago, Facebook changed their users’ Terms of Service to imply that Facebook owns your personal data indefinitely, even if you delete your own account. Bloggers got a hold of this change late last week and privacy debates erupted within the blogosphere and even on TV and cable news outlets. People said this was insane that Facebook owned users’ uploaded content  indefinitely and played all the sceneraios one could play in regards to teenagers’ rights and parents’ rights and peoples’ rights versus a huge company’s rights. 

Facebook responded yesterday but stating they were hearing the public’s outcry and that the CEO himself, Mark Zuckerberg, would not allow Facebook to take away users’ rights in the way the public was fearing. However, their ToS would stay the same which caused even more speculation and outcry from the blogosphere and the mainstream public.

Today, Facebook did a complete reversal and has now gone to the original ToS to quell the outcry of the public. Zuckerberg even wrote on Facebook’s blog today that he promises the 170 million FB users that his company will re-write a new ToS that everyone can understand. “Our next version will be a substantial revision from where we are now. It will reflect the principles I described yesterday around how people share and control their information, and it will be written clearly in language everyone can understand. Since this will be the governing document that we’ll all live by, Facebook users will have a lot of input in crafting these terms,” stated Zuckerberg.